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Welcome to Electric Power & Energy Systems Lab website. We conduct research on smart grid and sustainable energy, and teach both fundamental and advanced power engineering courses at UConn. Our team has proven expertise in smart distribution networks, microgrids and networked microgrids, solar PV power systems, real-time cyber-physical systems, power system resilience and risk assessment, grid converters for renewable resources, wind & PV farm planning, transmission system planning, electromagnetic transients and power quality, and ocean power systems. We are well prepared to tackle challenging problems in industry and to offer new technologies that shape future power grid.

Our Mission

Electric power systems are critical infrastructures for modern society. Our laboratory has been and will be dedicated to building a resilient, intelligent, sustainable, and safe power grid, and providing solutions not only technically & economically sound, but also satisfying social, environmental, & business development requirements.

12/1/2017 DOE has funded a new project for Power Lab to perform research for dynamic stability assessment of large interconnected grids under uncertainties. Thank you, DOE! We seek motivated Ph.D. candidates for this project. Please email your CV to Prof. Zhang if you are interested.

12/19/2017 Taofeek is selected to receive a Navy STEM Graduate Fellowship. The selection process was highly competitive and Taofeek was selected because of “the strong relevance of his research to Navy applications”. Congratulations!

11/30/2017 Yan’s paper “Formal Analysis of Networked Microgrids Dynamics” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Power Systems. Congratulations!

10/16/2017 Professor Chen-Ching Liu gave a distinguished lecture titled “Security and Resiliency of the Power Grid” in Laurel Hall 201. The event was co-sponsored by ECE and EEC, and power lab was honored to host Professor Liu at UConn.

09/21/2017 Dr. Zhang received the ECE Outstanding Research Achievements Award.

09/20/2017 A new record high: Four ECE students from Dr. Zhang’s classes will receive the IEEE Power and Energy Society Scholarships in 2017. Congratulations to our power engineering talents!

09/8/2017 Dr. Zhang gave an invited talk titled ‘Formal Analysis of Networked Microgrids Dynamics’ at MIT. Sincerely thank Professor Marija Ilic for inviting us and organizing such a great workshop! Thank Yan for her hard work to develop the formal theory.

07/24/2017 Lingyu joins United Technologies Research Center as a Senior Engineer. We all wish her greater successes in her new career. Congratulations to Lingyu!

07/20/2017 Taofeek has published his new concept Maximum Power Efficiency Tracking (MPET) for underwater wireless power transfer in the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics. Congratulations to Taofeek and Cyuansi!

07/18/2017 Lingyu participated in the IEEE PESGM and gave a panel presentation about the SDN-enabled resilient microgrid at UChicago’s Gleacher Center.

07/12/2017 UConn is the top school among 24 Northeastern U.S. universities in terms of the total number of IEEE PES Scholarship applications! Wish more UConn Power Engineering students will receive the scholarships in 2017.

06/26/-06/28 2017 Our team successfully demonstrated our prototype SD2N in the 2017 US Ignite Application Summit, Austin, TX, and gave an invited talk titled “SD2N: Software-Dened Urban Distribution Network for Smart Cities” in the Smart and Connected Communities Researchers Summit. Many thanks to Yan, Lingyu, Yanyuan,Bing, Mikhail, Shaobo and Tao for their hard work in the past six months!

02/21/2017 Power Lab and Secure Computation Lab published a paper on synchronized hardware Trojan attacks in the 2nd Workshop on Cyber-Physical Security and Resilience in Smart Grids. Nice job!

02/13/2017 Lingyu, Taofeek, Kelly and Ethan are recognized on Winter 2017 ECE Newsletter for their academic excellence and services. Congratulations.

01/17/2017 Jason Philhower joins Power Lab to pursue his PhD degree. As a Professional Engineer, Jason brings strong expertise in power generation and distribution. We warmly welcome Jason to our family and wish him success and happiness for his future here at UConn.

12/15/2016 Dr. Zhang is nominated to be a member of CIGRÉ WG D2.43, a working group to produce a framework of guidelines for Electric Power Utilities to develop, deploy and manage SDN technologies.

11/21/2016 Lingyu’s work on resilient microgrids has been accepted and scheduled for presentation at the 2017 IEEE PES General Meeting, July 16 – 20, 2017 in Chicago, IL.

11/17/2016 Today Yan gave birth to a healthy and handsome baby boy Eric. We all wish Yan and her newborn a future filled with good health, love, and happiness. Congratulations to Yan and her family!

11/16/2016 Teaming with Eversource Energy (formerly Northeast Utilities and NSTAR), United Illuminating and other industry partners, Power Lab team members have started collecting data and information for the tens of thousands of commercial and residential PV systems connecting to Connecticut’s distribution grid.

09/06/2016 Taofeek has been appointed as a Session Chair of MTS/IEEE OCEANS’16, Monterey, CA. Taofeek will be the Chair for Ocean Energy, Aquaculture, etc. in the Blue Economy. Congratulations to Taofeek for being recognized by the top conference in ocean engineering!

06/16/2016 CCAT and Power Lab successfully co-hosted a workshop on community microgrids in East Hartford. This workshop disseminated the study results obtained byLingyu and her team Kevin Burke, Hunter Finneran and Elia D’Onofrio. Their results were highly complimented by USDA and DEEP managers. Congratulations Lingyu, Kevin, Hunter and Elia!

“On Thursday, June 16, 2016, from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM, the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT), the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the University of Connecticut (UConn), and Eversource Energy will be hosting an “Energy Reliability/Microgrids for Rural Municipalities” workshop at CCAT’s Offices at 222 Pitkin Street in East Hartford, CT. Eligible municipalities, consultants/developers, and other interested stakeholders are invited to attend.”

06/09/2016 Power Lab will demonstrate our new microgrid technology in the GCTC Expo, June 12-15, Austin, TX.

06/09/2016 Lingyu and Yanyuan’s new programmable network prototype will be demonstrated in US Ignite Summit next week in Austin, TX.

06/09/2016 Tyler and Taofeek’s work on underwater wireless power transfer is accepted by MTS/IEEE OCEANS’16, Monterey, CA.

06/06/2016 Shifted Frequency Analysis (SFA), a next generation dynamic analysis method created by Dr. Zhang, has now been implemented in the GridLAB-D software by scientists in Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Seattle as an algorithmic framework to accelerate the challenging task of simulating complex distribution networks with many renewable energy sources and microgrids.PNNL scientists have successfully used SFA to study microgrids and large scale 342-bus distribution grid and reported a 17x speedup and great accuracy.